Draft:Beyond All Reason (video game)

Beyond All Reason (BAR) is a real-time strategy video game, in the lineage of Total Annihilation, released for Windows and Linux. It is a free and open-source software project that uses a fork of Spring Engine called Recoil. BAR retains the original gameplay of Total Annihilation with almost every feature reimagined, extended, or redesigned by the community over the long history of the project.

History
BAR grew out of early modifications to Total Annihilation and from games built on the Spring Engine, such as UberHack, Absolute Annihilation, and Balanced Annihilation. Work done in the community was crucial to the development of BAR, with Balanced Annihilation providing the basis for Beyond All Reason. In late 2016, developers from the SpringRTS community forums moved the project to Github, and later in early 2019 the community formed a Discord server which became the primary location for developers and players to communicate. Beyond All Reason grew into active open source project that aspired to provide a modern Total Annihilation experience.

Gameplay
Beyond All Reason revolves around capturing metal extraction points, or "mexes", building up one's base and economy, and producing units to destroy the enemy and their resources. Players spawn in with a powerful unit called the commander, the destruction of which ends the game. A popular game mode is team mode, where each player controls one commander on a team, with the victory condition being to eliminate all enemy commanders. Other game modes include Free-for-All (FFA), 1v1, and two cooperative game modes.

Much of the core gameplay is similar to Total Annihilation, with the two economic resources being metal and energy. Metal acts like a more stable resource and can generally be reclaimed from units or their wrecks. Energy is used to construct buildings, build units, and fire some weapons, and in turn is much more ephemeral.

Comparison with Total Annihilation
Beyond All Reason directly descends from Total Annihilation, and as such, many of the core gameplay elements are similar. However, there are many differences that define BAR as a distinct game. The new 3D engine allows for a much more complex and larger scale game, while interface improvements simultaneously increase the ability for a player to micromanage the orders of individual units in the game. In giving his first impressions of BAR, Chris Taylor (video game designer) stated the seeing BAR was "surreal", and how his original work inspired further projects to go on to "become [their] own institution".

On top of the improved engine is a customizable interface framework written in Lua, that modernizes the original interface. For instance, orders to a group of units can be dragged in a line, given over a circular area, and/or also cycled or put on repeat. Many of the UI features, such as the ability to line drag units, majorly change the original gameplay.

Many of the units in BAR have a direct analog a unit in Total Annihilation. However, over the history of the game, units have been redesigned and rebalanced to fit in competitive multiplayer gameplay.

Recoil Engine
The Recoil Engine is a fork of the SpringRTS engine with numerous performance and other improvements. For example:


 * Additional multi-threaded pathfinding
 * Remastered textures, effects and lighting
 * New modern GL4 renderer

Release
BAR is released as a public alpha and downloadable through the official website. The developers have indicated that they plan to release the game on Steam in the future.

Reception
BARit has been both well received by the community and in reviews. Reviews note the game's large amount of strategic depth, difficult learning curve, engrossing large scale battles featuring hundreds of units, and its high level of polish. PCMag summarized it glowingly, "A spiritual successor to 1997's Total Annihilation, Beyond All Reason is a free-to-play, community-driven, open-source strategy game that is shaping up to be the best RTS release in years."